Case Study Pharmapool AG

Efficient Material Flow for Pharmaceuticals

Every company tries to reduce costs, react flexibly to changes in the market and stay competitive. But this only works if the internal processes are well coordinated and fine-tuned. This was the experience for Pharmapool, a Swiss pharmaceuticals wholesaler. The requirements of modern order fulfilment and distribution logistics were too high for the existing warehouse design. Therefore, the company decided in favour of a new warehouse with modern equipment and a new order picking concept. This was supposed to fully exploit the potential with regard to internal processes.

Since 2011, a successful overall concept with a semi-automated system, consisting of

The goods and services SSI SCHAEFER contributed include planning and consulting, project management and after-sales services. To achieve the best possible results in this process, we started cooperating with Pharmapool’s architect and project team at the very beginning. This way, our propositions on warehouse layout became part of the project and we made sure that the final layout would be ideally suited to accommodate the order picking system.

Due to this sophisticated concept, the facility in Widnau, Switzerland, now features around 10,000 SKUs in 200,000 packages available for shipment. The individual order picking areas are connected through automatic conveyor technology thus merging into a single system. With this well-structured, transparent facility design, Pharmapool’s warehouse is remarkably efficient.

In fact, the new system increased order picking efficiency by 30%. After the initial start-up phase and the training of the staff, the new facility also significantly sped up the material flow. And because of the especially clear design of the order picking areas and the picking processes, compiling and fulfilling orders is now much simpler. The error rate dropped to virtually zero.